It is the debtor that is ruined by hard times.

I leave the governor's office next week, and with it public life[which] has been on the whole a pleasant one. But for ten years and over my salaries have not equalled my expenses, and there has been a feeling of responsibility, a lack of independence, and a necessary neglect of my family and personal interests and comfort, which make the prospect of a change comfortable to think of.

I too mean to be out of politics. The ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment gives me the boon of equality before the law, terminates my enlistment, and discharges me cured.

Honesty, good intentions and industry, you will have of course. Without these your career would soon end with the loss of your good name. But you must be ambitious to be a good deal more. Webb Hayes, his son, went on to found what had become the Union Carbide Corporation.

Must swear off from swearing. Bad habit.

[T]his free and easy old-bachelor sort of life is quite full of fun and jollity. Pease and myself room together; and everything like order and neatness is banished from our presence as a nuisance--old letters and old boots and shoes, duds clean and duds dirty, books and newspapers, tooth-brushes, shoe-brushes, and clothes-brushes, all heaped together on chairs, settees, etc., in dusty and "most admired confusion." Now, what is there imaginable in clean, tidy private life equal to this?

Virtue is defined to be mediocrity, of which either extreme is vice.